Virtualized computing is a way to reduce computing costs and/or provide a more robust computing environment. Using virtualized computing, a customer may be able to purchase computing resources for a given period of time, for example. Moreover, a virtualized computing service provider may provide a service level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing a certain level of reliability. While virtualized computing has been available for some time, virtualized computing service implementations have adjusted with changing technology. With the advent of the Internet, for instance, the access to computing resources over a network has given rise to the notion that computational power may become increasingly similar to a utility. In this way, more computationally intensive processing may take place somewhere in the network away from a client device, while the local processing on the client device may be simply rendering the results delivered over the network, for example.
In some virtualized computing environments, a virtual network is used to provide a logically isolated virtual network for a user. With overlay networking (e.g., virtual networking) the user can be given complete control over the virtual network, including selecting an IP address range, creation of subnets, configuration of route tables, etc. A virtual network is a virtualized computer network which is built on top of an underlying physical network and physical computing resources. Nodes in the overlay network are assigned virtual IP addresses and packets sent to and from the nodes are routed through one or more physical links in the underlying network.
Despite the usefulness of overlay networks, some applications on overlay networks may experience issues in using multicast and other similar communication protocols efficiently. Multicast and other similar communication protocols are often used to deliver data to multiple recipients in a network environment. In traditional multicast network environments, a sender may send packets of data to a network whereby various routers and/or gateways in the network may replicate the packets and subsequently deliver the data to various interested recipients. However, adequately addressing multicast issues in a virtual network may present additional costs to organizations that rely on multicast or other similar protocols in a virtualized computing environment.